#Chazzers

[deeisace]

I've never had a living room, I'm so excited!

[neil-gaiman]

Hi! Not a Good Omens question:

In "The Ocean at the End of the Lane," there's a bit where the grandmother talks about how people "essen" while pigs "fressen." What I found interesting is that she uses the Yiddish word "Chazzer" (Khazer/חזיר) when talking about pigs. I was wondering if this pointed to the main character being of Ashkenazic descent.

Either way, as a Yiddish speaker, it was really exciting to see it :)

You'll find him talking about aunts calling him a little momzer at the beginning of Chapter 6 as well. And yes.

[austinkleon]

Mel Bochner, The Joys of Yiddish, 2012

KIBBITZER, wise guy KVETCHER, chronic complainer K'NOCKER, braggart KUNI LEMMEL, simpleton NUDNICK, nag NEBBISH, sad sack NUDZH, pesterer GONIF, shady character DREYKOP, someone who gives you a headache CHAZZER, greedy person CHAIM YANKEL, nobody ALTER KOCKER, cranky old man MOISHE PUPIK, contrarian MESHUGENER, crazy person TUMLER, prankster TSITSER, useless bystander SHMOOZER, gossip SCHMO, fall guy SHLEMIEL, social misfit SHLIMAZEL, born loser SHVITZER, show-off PISHER, someone who still pees in his pants PLOSHER, blowhard PLATKE-MACHER, troublemaker

“Personally, I find the words quite funny,” Bochner said in his 2007 lecture at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts.

[mootasticmooface]

Charity shop number 2. I think I’ll call it a day now. #CharityShop #Chazzer #Blythswood #Inverness (at Inverness) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChNHNjVoMph/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[riddlerlesbian]

my favorite part of yugioh gx is when THE chazz shouts "it's chazzering time!" and chazzes all over the place

[doctorbleed]

“Do you know what a chazzer is Frank? That’s a pig, that I don't eat. Neither do you Frank.”

[zeroexelol]

Con dolor de cabeza, solo en casa, mi pololo trabajando y mis padres y hermana me abandonaron u.u pero ya llegarán xD #gaychile #gay #verano #chazzer #love #gaycouple (en Santiago, Chile) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5yP859pesP/?igshid=6odybwnm9t5j

[festivenatural]

british people: reblog this if the word ‘chazzer’ means anything to u and put what it means in the tags, i wanna check something real quick

[abonethrownfromthevoid]

U can’t expect ur professors to call u chazzer m8

lol i can expect them to call me charlie though

[deeisace]

Have decided, furniture chazzer now - I'll get home in time to do the dishes and take the bin out, at very least, without being shouted at for walking around my own flat, and at least those are things off tomorrow's list!

Question now is, do I go home and do a bit of cleaning before the horrid man downstairs gets home himself, or do I go to the charity furniture shop now, and then do all of the cleaning tomorrow cs I'll have 8 hours to do it in then instead of like 3

[chiseler]

The Crowd Doesn’t Just Roar, It Thinks: Warner Bros.’ All-Talking Revolution

“Iconic” is a gassy word for a masterwork of unquestioned approval. But it also describes compositions that actually resemble icons in their form and function, “stiff” by inviolate standards embodied in, say, Howard Hawks characters moving fluidly in and out of the frame. Whenever I watch William A. Wellman’s 1933 talkie Wild Boys of the Road, these standards—themselves rigid and unhelpful to understanding—fall away. An entire canonical order based on naturalism withers. 

To summon reality vivid enough for the 1930s—during which 250,000 minors left home in hopeless pursuit of the job that wasn’t—Wellman inserts whispering quietude between explosions, cesuras that seem to last aeons. The film’s gestating silences dominate the rather intrusive New Deal evangelism imposed by executive order from the studio. Amid Warner Bros.’ ballyhooing of a freshly-minted American president, they were unconsciously embracing the wrecking-ball approach to a failed capitalist system. That is, when talkies dream, FDR don’t rate. However, Marxist revolution finds its American icon in Wild Boys’ sixteen-year-old actor Frankie Darro, whose cap becomes a rude little halo, a diminutive lad goaded into class war by a chance encounter with a homeless man. 

“You got an army, ain’t ya?” In the split second before Darro’s “Tommy” realizes the import of these words, the Great Depression flashes before his eyes, and ours. No conspicuous montage—just a fixed image of pain. Until suddenly a collective lurch transmutes job-seeking kids into a polity that knows the enemy’s various guises: railroad detectives, police, galled citizens nosing out scapegoats. Wellman’s crowd scenes are, in effect, tableaux congealing into lucent versions of the real thing. The miracle he performs is a painterly one: he abstracts and pares down in order to create realism.  

Wellman has a way of organizing people into palpable units, expressing one big emotional truth, then detonating all that potential energy. In his assured directorial hands, Wild Boys of the Road sustains powerful rhythmic flux. And yet, other abstractions, the kind life throws at us willy-nilly, only make sense if we trust our instinctive hunches (David Lynch says typically brilliant, and typically cryptic, things on this subject). 

I’m thinking of iconography that invites associations beyond familiar theories, which, in one way or another, try to give movies syntax and rely too heavily on literary ideas like “authorship.” Nobody can corner the market on semantic icons and run up the price. My favorite hot second in Wild Boys of the Road is when young Sidney Miller spits “Chazzer!” (“Pig!”) at a cop. Even the industrial majesty of Warner Bros. will never monopolize chutzpah. The studio does, however, vaunt its own version of socialism, whether consciously or not, in concrete cinematic terms: here, the crowd becomes dramaturgy, a conscious and ethical mass pushing itself into the foreground of working-class poetics. The crowd doesn’t just roar, it thinks. Miller’s volcanic cri de coeur erupts from the collective understanding that capitalism’s gendarmes are out to get us.

Wellman’s Heroes for Sale, hitting screens the same year as Wild Boys, 1933, further advances an endless catalogue of meaning for which no words yet exist. We’re left (fumblingly and woefully after the fact) to describe a rupture. Has the studio system gone stark raving bananas?! Once again, the film’s ostensible agenda is to promote Roosevelt’s economic plan; and, once again, a radical alternative rears its head.

Wellman’s aesthetic constitutes a Dramaturgy of the Crowd. His compositions couldn’t be simpler. I’m reminded of the “grape cluster” method used by anonymous Medieval artists, in which the heads of individual figures seem to emerge from a single shared body, a highly simplified and spiritual mode of constructing space that Arnold Hauser attributes to less bourgeoise societies. 

If the mythos of FDR, the man who transformed capitalism, is just that, a story we Americans tell ourselves, then Heroes for Sale represents another kind of storytelling: one firmly rooted to the soiled experience of the period. Amid portrayals of a nation on the skids—thuggish cops, corrupt bankers, and bone-weary war vets (slogging through more rain and mud than they’d ever encountered on the battlefield)—one rather pointed reference to America’s New Deal drags itself from out of the grime. “It’s just common horse sense,” claims a small voice. Will national leadership ever find another spokesman as convincing as the great Richard Barthelmess, that half-whispered deadpan amplified by a fledgling technology, the Vitaphone? After enduring shrapnel to the spine, dependency on morphine, plus a prison stretch, his character Tom Holmes channels the country’s pain; and his catalog of personal miseries—including the sudden death of his young wife—qualifies him as the voice of wisdom when he explains, “It takes more than one sock in the jaw to lick 120 million people.” How did Barthelmess—owner of the flattest murmur in Talking Pictures, a far distance from the gilded oratory of Franklin Roosevelt, manage to sell this shiny chunk of New Deal propaganda? 

How did he take the film’s almost-crass reduction of America’s economic cataclysm, that metaphorical sock on the jaw, and make it sound reasonable? Barthelmess was 37 when he made Heroes for Sale; an aging juvenile who less than a decade earlier had been one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office titans. But no matter how smoothly he seemed to have survived the transition, his would always be a screen presence more redolent of the just-passed Silent-era than the strange new world of synchronized sound. And yet, through a delivery rich with nuance for generous listeners and a glum piquancy for everyone else, deeply informed by an awareness of his own fading stardom, his slightly unsettling air of a man jousting with ghosts lends tremendous force to the New Deal line. It echoes and resolves itself in the viewer’s consciousness precisely because it is so eerily plainspoken, as if by some half-grinning somnambulist ordering a ham on rye. Through it we are in the presence of a living compound myth, a crisp monotone that brims with vacillating waves of hope and despair.

Tom is “The Dirty Thirties.” A symbolic figure looming bigger than government promises, towering over Capitalism itself, he’s reduced to just another soldier-cum-hobo by the film’s final reel, having relinquished a small fortune to feed thousands before inevitably going “on the bum.” If he emits wretchedness and self-abnegation, it’s because Tom was originally intended to be an overt stand-in for Jesus Christ—a not-so-gentle savior who attends I.W.W. meetings and participates in the Bonus March, even hurling a riotous brick at the police. These strident scenes, along with “heretical” references to the Nazarene, were ultimately dropped; and yet the explosive political messages remain.

More than anything, these key works in the filmography of William A. Wellman present their viewers with competing visions of freedom; a choice, if you will. One can best be described as a fanciful, yet highly addictive dream of personal comfort — the American Century's corrupted fantasy of escape from toil, tranquility, and a material luxury handed down from the then-dying principalities of Western Europe — on gaudy, if still wondrous, display within the vast corpus of Hollywood's Great Depression wish-list movies. The other is rarely acknowledged, let alone essayed, in American Cinema. There are, as always, reasons for this. It is elusive and ever-inspiring; too primal to be called revolutionary. It is a vision of existential freedom made flesh; being unmoored without being alienated; the idea of personal liberation, not as license to indulge, but as a passport to enter the unending, collective struggle to remake human society into a society fit for human beings. 

In one of the boldest examples of this period in American film, the latter vision would manifest itself as a morality play populated by kings and queens of the Commonweal— a creature of the Tammany wilderness, an anarchist nurse, and a gaggle of feral street punks (Dead End Kids before there was a 'Dead End'). Released on June 24, 1933, Archie L. Mayo's The Mayor of Hell stood, not as a standard entry in Warner Bros.’ Social Consciousness ledger, but as an untamed rejoinder to cratering national grief.

by Daniel Riccuito

Special thanks to R.J. Lambert

[kentparsonbirthdaybash]

Cards Close to the Chest

Prompt: Supernatural

Characters: Kent, Aces Ensemble

--

All of the guys chirped Parse for buying a pack of tarot cards. He might have been their star-talent rookie, but that didn’t mean he was above some healthy razzing. Especially since he bought those cards, at all fucking places, a Barnes & Noble. The guy lived in Vegas but he bought his occult knicknacks at a store that was designed for bougie soccer moms. Seriously, who did that?

“Since when does Barnes & Noble even have tarot decks?” Carl wanted to know, raising his voice to be heard over all the hooting and hollering.

Parse just shrugged, looking cool and collected as ever. “I think it was part of some special promo. They were in the section with all the books for twelve-year-olds about vampires.”

“Oh, God, I think I saw that,” Max recalled, his face scrunched up in memory. “Edmonton, right? God, what a hellhole. Couldn’t even find a decent coffee place, so we had to go to ’Noble’s in-store cafe. They fucked up my latte, too.”

Parse swept his gaze over the assembled team. “Anybody want me to do a card reading for them?” he offered, brandishing the deck at them. “I think I’ve about got the hang of it.”

His generosity was met with a chorus with a chorus of scoffs and eyerolls until Burnsy, one of the vets, volunteered.

“Always wanted to have my fortune told by somebody,” he said easily, shooing Carl out of his own stall and sitting down beside Parse. “Go ahead, Parser. Solve the mysteries of the universe. Or at least tell me how I’m going to do in our next game.”

Parse had Burnsy select three cards from the deck (“Six is the usual for reading an entire future, so we have to scale that down to focus on just the game.”) and then did his best to decipher them. The rest of the locker room either feigned disinterest or listened with skeptical expressions, curious in spite of themselves. 

“So, it looks like you got the Page of Cups, which means a happy surprise is coming your way. Then there’s the Three of Swords, which means there’s gonna be some suffering. And then we have the Nine of Wands, which means … resilience and determination. Huh.” Parse squinted at the foldout page of instructions. “So, I guess you’re going to suffer, get a nice surprise, and then recover? Can’t be sure of that order, though.”

“What’s there not to be sure about?” Carl asked scornfully. “He’s going to get hurt and then get better. That’s generally how that works.”

 “Well, at least we know I’m not dying,” Burnsy said cheerfully. “Thanks for reading my fortune, bro. I guess we’ll see if it comes true or not.”

While Parse still got grief from some of the guys about giving up hockey and becoming Vegas’s next great stage magician with those cards of his, everyone forgot about the prediction for Burnsy. That was, until their next game, when an attempted slapshot at the Flyers’ goal in the last four seconds of play rebounded off of Burnsy’s thigh, entering the net and giving the Aces their victory.

“Wait a minute, that’s exactly what you said would happen,” Jello recalled when they were out for drinks later that night. “Parse, you said that Burnsy would suffer, but there would be a happy surprise, and then he’d get over it. Well, the dude took a slapshot to the leg, got us a goal, and now he’s left with a hefty bruise where the puck hit him. But he’s still gonna be okay.”

“Hey, that’s right,” Parse said, but he didn’t seem especially amazed. “Guess that did happen, huh?” There was a teasing look in his eyes, which were blue that day.

“Just a coincidence,” Carl insisted. “If he broke out those cards again and tried to make sense of them, none of it would come true.”

“Wanna bet?” Jello challenged, raising his chin stubbornly.

So, with fifty dollars riding on the outcome, the next day Parse did a full card reading for a neutral party: Max.

“Something you’ve wanted to happen for a while is gonna happen soon,” he informed Max as he pored over the cards. “But there’s strings attached, and it’s going to be difficult at times but rewarding at the end of the day. And also—” he tapped the Empress card, “—this one means motherhood, so possibly a kid will be involved?”

“God, I hope not,” Max said fervently. “Neither Lauren or I want kids.”

But just a few days later, when they were on the road, Max got a call from his wife, telling him that their elderly neighbor had fallen and broken her hip. The lady would be in rehab for the next six weeks and wouldn’t be able to take care of her dog even afterward. What would he think about them adopting a four-year-old Golden Retriever?

“I mean, we’ve always wanted a dog,” Max explained to the other guys. “We’ve talked about getting one but never really got around to it, so we’re totally going to do this. I really like that dog, too, she’s a real sweetheart.” 

Jello was emphatic that the circumstances proved him right. “Lauren getting a dog is basically her becoming a mom!” he insisted. “She’s still responsible for another living creature. And some people refer to their pets as their kids!”

“One, no it’s not,” Carl said flatly. “Two, those people are freaks. Three, this proves nothing.”

But a number of the rest of the team was convinced that it did, and suddenly Parser was regularly performing card readings for several of his teammates. Skeezy wanted to know if he should move into a development with an HOA (Parse predicted an inevitable sacrifice of freedom for contentment), Red was questioning how meeting his girlfriend’s parents would go (Disastrously, but through no fault of Red’s, and to his ultimate benefit), and Chazzer checked to see if his holiday plans would go smoothly (They wouldn’t and would just leave him disappointed).

One by one, each of Parse’s predictions came through. Skeezy found out that he couldn’t build the dream deck he’d always wanted if he moved into the HOA neighborhood, so he decided to look for a house elsewhere. Red went to meet his girlfriend’s parents, but her father announced during dinner out that he was divorcing her mother, rendering the rest of the visit extremely uncomfortable. His girlfriend, however was enormously impressed by him sticking it out with her despite the awkwardness. And Chazzer ended up stranded at the airport for nearly forty hours due to a blizzard taking place during his layover, missing his visit home entirely.

“So, like, everything he says is going to happen ends up happening,” Max concluded during a team breakfast. “He has a gift.”

Carl snorted. “No, he doesn’t. He’s making guesses and some of his guesses work out. You could read your horoscope in Seventeen magazine and get better results.”

“Yeah, how fair would it be if God or Buddha or whoever made Parser made him psychic and a total beast when it comes to hockey?” Jazzy put in.

“Maybe he’s so good at hockey because he’s psychic,” Jello suggested. “Everyone has always said that the reason he can score like he does is because he can anticipate where the puck is going to be. Maybe he’s not anticipating. Maybe he already knows before it actually happens.”

They all paused to think about that, even those of the team who were more skeptical about Parser.

For his part, though, Parser didn’t seem bothered one way or the other about if his predictions turned into reality. Whenever someone came up to him and began talking excitedly about how the cards had been right, he responded with a modest shrug and a small smile, casually engaging with his teammate but not seeming very moved by what they had to say.

“Do you even believe any of this mumbo-jumbo?” Carl demanded one day as he and Parser tossed a medicine ball back and forth between themselves during sit-ups.

“Not especially,” Parse replied easily, amusement glinting in his green eyes. “Definitely not as much as I’ve convinced some of the guys on the team to.”

Carl scowled. “Then why the Harry Potter act? Is it just a joke to you? A way you can secretly chirp the other guys?” Maybe Parser was just out to make fun of everybody. Maybe he was just trying to be a dick.

Parse tossed the medicine ball at him with unnecessary force. “No,” he replied flatly. “I don’t care if they believe it or not. I just think it’s good for them to believe in something, like destiny or fate or some bullshit like that if they’re already stressed out about what’s going to happen next. Helps them deal with it, weirdly enough. Guess they figure there’s nothing they can do if it’s already in the cards.” 

“Pathetic,” Carl snorted. 

“No, it’s not.” Those weird mood ring eyes of Parser’s went stormcloud gray. “Not if it helps the guys deal with what’s bothering them. Some people struggle with not knowing what’s going to happen in the future. This is a solution for that.”

“Huh.” Eyeing Parse and seeing the frown on his face, Carl decided that continuing this line of conversation would only increase the danger of Parser lobbing the medicine ball at his head. So he wisely changed the subject. “You ever use those cards to find out something for yourself? Like, about what’s going to happen to you down the road, I mean.” 

Actually, he was really curious about the answer, about if Parse had ever believed in the cards to tell him the future, or if he’d originally bought them with the idea of tricking the guys and helping them cope. If it was the second one, then that was super weird.

Parse’s eyes went even darker, going nearly black. “No. Not ever.”

But Carl somehow got the feeling that he was lying. He noticed that when Parse spoke, his thumb was stroking that Memorial Cup ring he’d won back in Juniors, the kind that were given to only the captain and the alternate captains of the winning team. When they’d seen that Parse still wore it after being drafted into the actual League, Carl and some of the other Aces had assumed it meant he was an arrogant prick. 

Now, though, Carl wasn’t quite sure what it meant. He also wasn’t sure why Parse lied about those cards—it wasn’t like the chirping had seemed to bother him before.

Still, the next time he saw Parser surrounded by teammates, each of them with a specific question they wanted him to answer by reading the cards, Carl kept his mouth shut. If their hotshot rookie wanted to do something to help out the team in his own freak way, Carl wasn’t going to stop him.

[sonic-justice-real-for]

I only care about how mod chazz is doing

Umm, I’m doing pretty Chazzy, thank you! The other mods are worthy of being cared about though, I think!!!!! They are. My comrades!!! My BOON COMPANIONS! My BOSOM BUDDIES!!!!!!!!!!! They may not Chazz as hard as I do (the ultimate Chazzer), but they are what you gamers call IGN 10/10! Chazz OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

★ Mod Chazz It Up!!!

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Mr Gaiman, In “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” on page 196, the protagonist recalls his grandmother telling him to eat properly, and says to eat “like a person, not a chazzer.” The other foreign words in this paragraph are all German, but this one is of Hebrew/Yiddish origin, which leads to my question: is the protagonist Jewish? This made me very excited when I read it and I was wondering if this was the intention when writing, or just a very happy piece of luck!

Well, it tells you that the protagonist has at least one Jewish grandmother.

[dracolizardlars]

oh my stars i just found the fucking rewrite I did of “gay or european” from Legally Blonde so it was my vampire OCs singing it, it’s fucking hilarious I enjoyed reading it so much dfghjkl;

the joke being that 4/6 of them are European (and let me tell you, when you’re European reading the lyrics of that song is like “what the fuck are you on about” because they treat the entire of Europe like it’s one country XD) so you had Chazzer and Nalani the Americans doing the “gay or European” thing like in the original song but i added Kaiden and Alaric being like “dude wtf” (they’re Russian, well. they were when I wrote this. they’re actually British now i changed everything)

i’m a comedic genius this is the best thing i’ve ever written

[mootasticmooface]

Oooooh! I do love a bargain. #CharityShop #Chazzer #HighlandHospice #Inverness #SaturdayVibes (at Inverness) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChNEXPUo0mt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=